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Kitchen Table and chairs

I can’t believe that it is almost October! It been a while since I have posted, but I have been busy! Just haven’t had time to write.
So I thought today I would share our kitchen table and chairs update! We bought this set when we bought our house, but now, five years later, the chairs are ripping and worn. We never used the table top without glass, because the veneer was so thin, and the finger prints on the glass were driving me crazy! So… time for an update!
I tried listing the set on Kijiji a couple times, but, no takers… Here is what it looked like when I listed it:

My plan was to sell the whole set and buy a new one, but, then look what I found!
Check out these chairs that I got for $5.99 each! Yes, that’s right, five dollars and ninety-nine cents! Needless to say, I bought all 6 of them that they were selling.

So, I decided to get rid of our old chairs, and repaint the new old chairs, but keep the old table. And… since I still had the paint I used for my other furniture, why not use it? I started by giving everything a light sand. John helped and it didn’t take that long, we used out little mouse sander. We didn’t remove all of the paint or varnish, we just made sure we removed the shine off the top.

And the table…

Then we used a little bit of water and an old rag to wipe everything down to get off some of the dust.

Then, It took three coats of the white paint to cover everything, so it didn’t look patchy. To antique it a little, I used a really fine sandpaper and sanded the edges. I sanded where I thought it would get worn anyways. That’s the great thing about antiquing, you don’t have to worry as much about it getting worn! The design of the table means that every time someone pushes in a chair, it bumps into one of the posts of table. So, it was areas like that as well as the edges of the table, and the tops of the chair that I sanded and antiqued.

Then, what I did is add a little line of stain in the cracks with a fine brush, and I wiped off the excess with a paint rag.

So I finished the rest of the chairs and table the same way, sanding, and staining, then wiping off the stain. Anywhere there was a crack or join, I added a little stain or sanded. I also recovered the chairs. They were recovered in a brown suede, and plastic, I just stapled the new material on top…I’ll post another day about recovering chairs, but it is pretty simple.

Here is what the set looks like finished…

I have to be honest here, I did run into to snag at the very end. I thought that I would add a coat of varnish just to the table top to seal the paint. I tried with a varnish spray, but it ended up looking all patchy. Then I tried a paint on varnish, and it still looked patchy. I thought I was going to have to sand it down and start again, but I tried putting the old piece of glass on top, and it worked great. You can’t see any of the imperfections, and it protects the table too… and no more sanding, yahoo
I really like the look of the lighter furniture, I thing it brightens up the kitchen.
Now, I still have a half of a can of paint….what else can I paint???